Friday, 2 February 2018

The Blind Musician and the Voyeurs 7

And one more Kertész: the photograph on the back-cover of the
catalogue to Eyewitness, the 2011 RA
exhibition, curated by Colin, of Hungarian Photographers of the Twentieth
Century, titled Circus 1920.

This, to me, is one of the most wonderful and mysterious of
Kertész’s photographs. Others may be more beautiful, more distinctly surreal,
more crisply observed, more melancholy or even desolate, but this photograph presents
us with a mystery at the very heart of photography. Do the couple know they are
being photographed? What are they both be watching? Surely there is only one
fortunate knot-hole to peek through. Where is the man’s right leg? Is it hidden
behind the left? And why do they need to peek through a hole? Can’t they afford
tickets?

But these are merely technical issues. The deeper questions
relate to the very nature of photography and our relationship to it. Why are we
fascinated by it? What does it do to us? Where does it position us? What is the
relationship between symbol and the moment? Between statement and implication?

Here is the poem that I called ‘The Voyeurs’.

The Voyeurs

What are they staring at? Haven’t
they seen enough?

Perhaps it’s natural to stare at
backs.

Just as we pass a lighted window,
light makes

visible that wealth of alien stuff

of which half our minds are made,

leaving us lustful, lost and
afraid.

They too are in transit. Look at
his hat

(a straw boater), her headscarf (a
long

inverted flame), the way their
clothes hang.

There must be a hole in the wooden
slat

and beyond it something perfectly
new

and terrifying that light will not
let through.

Two things struck me about the photograph when I first saw
it. The couple are observing a scene of people who do not know they are being
observed. That makes them voyeurs. But we ourselves are observing them
observing, which makes us voyeurs too. Is there, therefore, something at the
heart of photography that is, essentially voyeuristic, and, if so, is that one of
the reasons it fascinates us? For are we not natural voyeurs, fascinated by exposed
windows at dusk or by figures glimpsed in or from a train, rather as the James
Stewart photographer figure in Rear
Window is fascinated by events in neighbours’ windows? Something in the
Kertész photograph, or so it seems to me, strikes close to nature. We recognise
in it something of the hunter (animal or human) watching his prey (animal or
human.) And what of Susannah observed by the elders in the bible or the face
behind trembling lace curtains gazing out into any street?

That is one thought. The other is more disturbing. What is it
that we – or this couple here – are actually wanting to see. What is the
attraction of the circus? Why the fence? Why is the hole in the fence so much
like the aperture of a camera? What does the space beyond represent in the
imagination? Here we all are, all but invisible in the vast spaces of the galaxy,
marooned at our specific, microscopic moment of time.What is
there to see?

The poem has taken the liberty of interpreting a symbolic hint in the picture.
The inverted flame shape, suggested by the woman’s headscarf, is a conventional
symbol of death. Even if we do not consciously interpret it as such – and I
doubt whether Kertész did, or at least we do not know whether he articulated
such a thought in his own mind - once the photograph opens its multitude of
doors onto the fields of memory and imagination, the symbol, even though we
cannot name it, begins to speak to us and organise other parts of the image
into a possible coherent whole. The man’s one leg, the halo of his boater, the
absoluteness of those stern planks of wood with their jagged waves at just
about neck-level, combine to support the death narrative. There is nothing dramatic
in the narrative itself. Nothing is
obvious: it is all apprehension, all shudder, all admiration and marvel.